I have heard a lot of things about Quicksilver even before i got the mac, being surrounded by enthusiastic mac users. It sesms to be such a powerful utility all by itself. Prior to Mac I used Launchy on Windows and while its good, I could not find a good use for it at that time.
Fast forward to today, when I find time to poke around with Quicksilver to find out why its so great. I have some of my answers within minutes.
- It does common things spotlight can do, and faster. Now Spotlight is a cool feature in its own right, but it shows me possible files that I might be interested in based on the keystrokes that I enter. Quicksilver takes me straight to the file, period.
- It allows me more “complicated” tasks that spotlight is not able to do. Open a file? Sure, Spotlight can do that. Write something that comes to mind and save it as a file in the Ideas folder? Not that easy. What takes several moves involving spotlight is accomplished in a few tabs by quicksilver.
- It does what it does, then gets out of the way. Part of the reason why I stopped using OneNote and EverNote is that they hang around afterward in the form of a window. If I close them, when the next idea comes along I would have to open the file again and locate the place where I want to append the ideas to. Not very time consuming, but it is good if I just want to get it down so I don’t think about it anymore.
- It makes me want to use it for more complicated tasks. Compose a quick email? Sure. Do a quick calculation? Why not. What does that word mean? Do a quick search. The word here is quick, and I find that I engage more, with much less time.
I shall put up more information when I find time to, but this should be one of the nice things to have for a first time mac user. Sure, It takes some getting used to, but it should pay off in terms of time and effeciency.
